How Smart Is Your Dog? Test Your Pet’s Brain Power for Science

Brian Hare and his dog, Tasmania. Photo: Nick Pironio/Wired

Is your dog a genius or a dolt? Probably both, according to biological anthropologist Brian Hare of Duke University.

Dogs are astoundingly good at reading our gestures and learning words, but they totally fail at physics, Hare says. He’s not talking string theory. Most dogs are at a loss, for example, when their leash gets wound around a tree. Today Hare is launching a new company called Dognition that will, for a fee, analyze the cognitive strengths and weaknesses of your own beloved pooch.

Pony up $60 and you’ll get access to videos that walk even the most science-phobic dog owner through a series of simple experiments that assess things like navigation, memory, and empathy. Hare says the venture will generate new data for researchers and help formulate new questions to tackle in the lab. A small percentage of the profits will fund research on animal behavior.

Hare and his wife and collaborator Vanessa Woods have also written a book on dog cognition, The Genius of Dogs: How Dogs Are Smarter Than You Think. They argue that the social skills of dogs rival — and in some ways exceed — those of our closest primate relatives, chimpanzees, and may have much to tell us about how our own species evolved its social savvy.

Last week Wired visited Hare’s laboratory at Duke to ask him about his new company, what makes dogs smart and how much most dog owners know about their own best friends.

Wired: What do dogs do that’s smart?

Hare: Science has ignored dogs and the book highlights why that’s changing. We’ve discovered what makes them remarkable, and it’s very similar to what develops in kids that makes them remarkable. It’s that kids start using gestures and learning words in a way that other species don’t. The fact that dogs share this remarkable ability that we think is so important to being human is what got people (researchers) really fascinated.

Wired: In what ways are they dumb?

Hare: They’re incredibly vapid when it comes to understanding the physical world, things like understanding that if you’re connected to somebody with a leash you can’t go on the other side of the lamppost. There’s good evidence that that really is a cognitive constraint. They just don’t get it.

Wired: Many dog owners fancy themselves experts on canine cognition. Are there areas where the research contradicts popular beliefs?

Hare: One is the idea that dogs need hierarchy and respond to an alpha dog. Feral dogs do not have a dominance hierarchy that’s usually recognizable. The leader of the dog pack is the one with most affiliative relationships with other members of the group. In the dog world, being mean and alpha doesn’t really translate into much. In wolves it does. The dominant wolf is the one they get up and follow hunting the next day, and that’s been used to justify a training technique in dogs, where for example you should never let your dog win at tug-of-war because you need to be alpha. That experiment has been done and it makes no difference. Maybe the training technique works, but the rationale for it is not based on anything in the scientific literature.

Wired: What about guilt? Everyone seems to think their dog feels guilty when it does something bad.

Hare: The best study on that was by Alexandra Horowitz. [Horowitz had dog owners instruct their dogs not to eat a treat placed on the floor and then leave the room. When the owners returned, a research assistant told them whether their dog had obeyed — only sometimes the researcher lied and said the dog had eaten the treat when it hadn’t, or vice-versa]. The only thing that predicted the dog’s response was whether their person looked upset. They got that guilty look whenever the person thought they had done something wrong, regardless of whether they had. Dogs are probably responding to your behavior rather than what they’ve done. That’s an area where people attribute too much.

Wired: What does science have to say about the differences among breeds?

Hare: Currently science has very little to say about that. The genetic differences are tiny, minuscule. The good news for those who have strong opinions about a breed difference is: No one’s going to contradict you using science. But the bad news is there’s nothing to back you up either. There are so many breeds that you’d need so many dogs to answer a question in a rigorous way. The AKC [American Kennel Club] recognizes 175 breeds. To study one trait I need 100 dogs. I’d spend the rest of my life testing 20,000 dogs. With Dognition we could do that in a weekend. That’s the hope, that we can look at some of these issues quantitatively.

Wired: Will you be able to trust the data you get? It’s not coming from trained scientists…

Hare: A lot of people have been asking that. There’ll be a lot of noise, but the point is there’ll be a big signal. The nice thing is if we make a discovery with Dognition, we can follow it up in the lab.

Wired: In the book you argue that wolves essentially domesticated themselves to give rise to the first dogs. Can you explain that briefly?

Hare: The idea is that about 50,000 years ago people went from being pretty mobile foragers to being fully settled and raising crops. They were in the same place for decades, eating almost the same stuff that wolves eat, creating garbage. That created a new ecological niche for any wolf that’s bold enough and non-aggressive enough to take advantage of it.

What we know from the Belyaev experiments [in which wild foxes bred for dozens of generations became tame] is if you select against aggression, you create these other changes just by accident. The non-aggressive foxes also became better at being able to understand our social cues and read us better, and they had morphological changes [including smaller teeth, floppy ears, and mottled coats] that made them look different from the original wild foxes. If you go back to the proto-dogs, you might see the same shift. People could recognize them and say, oh, that’s that friendly wolf, and not chase them away or kill them.

Wired: What did our ancestors get out of letting these proto-dogs hang around?

Hare: That’s where you just have to speculate. There’s evidence that when groups of modern hunter gatherer societies are introduced to dogs, they start using them to find prey that they may not be able to find on their own or that they’ve already killed but aren’t able to locate. In a forest, where it’s hard to see prey, dogs are really good. Even in a big open area like a savannah, where they’re really useful is as an early warning system. Most lethal raids in hunter-gatherer societies occurred at dawn or dusk. You’d run in and try to kill your rivals and steal their women with a quick strike and get out of there. Dogs recognize strangers and they’re going to bark.

In the book we speculate for fun that dogs could have been the first [food] storage system. When times get tough and food is scarce, you could just go out and get one. You’ve got your ham sandwich waiting for you. We also suggest that humans got the idea for domestication of crops from their experience with dogs. You can call it wild speculation, but I think it’s not unreasonable to suggest that having protodogs in hunter-gather societies could have helped with the gestalt of planting plants.

Wired: Why do you think studying dogs can tell us something about our own evolution?

Hare: Cognition doesn’t fossilize. We have this wonderful fossil assemblage of the hominid lineage, but we don’t have any way to test the behavior of baby Neanderthals and Homo erectus, which is what I’d really love to do. Within the constraints of what their brains are capable of, dogs have converged with us in terms of their social skills. We’re trying to make the argument that if selection against aggression could lead to more social skills in dogs, well the same thing could have happened in our species.

Brian Hare. Photo: Nick Pironio/Wired

Wired: What do you hope to accomplish with Dognition?

Hare: There are three goals. One is outreach, to get people to have a better understanding of what science is, and that they can participate in it. I want to get people to not be scared of science. The second goal is discovery. It can give us a really powerful tool to answer scientific questions. The third thing is funding. When we’re profitable we’ll fund non-invasive animal behavior research with 2 to 5 percent of the profits.

Wired: That’s not very much, is it?

Hare: It depends what the profits are. I’m not saying it’s a huge percentage, but it’s not nothing. The National Science Foundation budget for anthropology, basically all research on human evolution, is $3 million a year. If we could contribute another million or two, that would be great.

Wired: Is that realistic?

Hare: One percent of the market would be 1 million dogs, more or less worldwide. In our beta program we had people from 38 countries sign up.

Wired: That’s 60 million bucks!

Hare: And that’s just for the canine assessment test. But there’s also a subscription program. You pay $10 a month and you get a new game every month and access to trainer tips. We’ve got some really awesome trainers who will give ideas on how to train your dog based on the cognitive profile. That’s going to launch in March.

Wired: How would researchers get access to funding?

Hare: We have to figure out how that’s going to work. We have a scientific advisory board, and the model would be something like National Geographic or the Leakey Foundation. There would be applications and people would decide.

Wired: You’re billing this as citizen science, but doesn’t asking people to pay to play go against the spirit of citizen science?

Hare: That’s a great question, and it’s true, I don’t think it’s conventional to have people who are participating in citizen science pay. Citizen science is an altruistic endeavor. It’s a collective action, crowdsourcing approach. We’re doing that, but the other half of it is we’ll tell you about your dog. That’s what you’re paying for, the technology and expertise and the time that went into developing this new way that you can find out instantly about your dog in your own home. And it’s also going to help us understand all dogs. It is different, and I think some people will think it’s good and some people will see it as bad, but it’s the only way we could do this. I don’t feel bad about it.